


Elemental

by Jadzibelle



Category: Haven - Fandom
Genre: F/M, Longing, M/M, Multi, character introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-27
Updated: 2015-02-27
Packaged: 2018-03-15 10:20:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 850
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3443561
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jadzibelle/pseuds/Jadzibelle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sea and stone and sky, lashing rain and trembling earth and screaming wild wind.</p>
<p>Audrey watches her boys in a moment of calm, and considers the shapes they all take.</p>
<p>(Set at the end of episode 1.12, Resurfacing, but it's not exactly specific to the episode.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Elemental

Audrey thinks that maybe she’s always belonged here.  That maybe Haven is the only place she’s ever belonged.  That maybe it’s the only place she’s ever even _existed_.

Duke and Nathan are, for once, playing nice.  The sun is pouring down on them, making Duke’s eyes shine like gold and softening Nathan’s sharp edges, and they’re smiling, laughing together, the jagged edges between them momentarily covered over.

High tide, today- no sign of the scars on their shore.

The thought fits them, better and better every day.  The longer she knows them, the more she sees it, who they are.

Duke is easy.  Duke is the very sea he loves so dearly.  He entices, draws the eye and pulls at the heart, stirs passions good and bad.  He is at once immensely predictable in his essential self, and utterly and entirely unknowable in his moments and moods.  He is _fickle_ , sweet one moment, soothing the next, rage and violence and lethal cold in intervals that cannot be controlled, only survived- but fickle is not faithless, and the sea remains the sea.  Anyone with the patience to learn its moods can rely on it, can trust its bounty and its beauty.  Duke can be trusted so long as one never forgets who and what he is- so long as one remembers that there are depths in him, dark and cruel and _unknown_.

Nathan is more of a challenge; Nathan is _harder_ , rough-hewn stone.  She’d thought him a pillar, once, strength and determination carved out of marble- but that was the shape someone else had tried to make of him.  Nathan is no pillar.  He’s the wild, tangled threads of black rock new-made, the sharp and glassy bite of obsidian, impossible to bend but so easy to shatter.  He’s stone, but he’s stone only one step removed from _fire_ , energy and movement and impossible strength locked away, frozen in place.  He is _potential_ , he is a foundation and a mountain and a mound of shattered glass, eternal but never unchanging.

They are  _different,_ and she isn't sure if that's what makes things difficult between them, or what draws them together.  Because they are so clearly  _drawn_.

Watching them, it is easy to see that Duke loves Nathan the way the ocean loves the shore- constantly drawing near only to turn tail and run.  Audrey thinks that he keeps hoping that one day, Nathan will be able to catch him- she thinks he’s fooling himself, because no one can catch the ocean.  They can only throw themselves into it and hope it doesn’t drown them for their trouble.  Nathan, though, Nathan seems determined to try- if Duke loves Nathan the way the ocean loves the shore, Nathan loves Duke the way a dam loves a river, absolutely, implacably determined to shape him into who Nathan wants him to be, and never mind who Duke _is_.  Never mind what damage pushing him out of his comfortable track will do.

She thinks it’s the sort of love that can only end in tragedy, the sort of love that leaves scars and stories behind.  Sooner or later, one of them will break- the ocean will wear away the stone, or the dam will strangle the river, and Audrey thinks that whichever of them is left standing will regret, immensely, getting what they want.  But until then, it is just the shore, with laughter at high water and snarling fights at low, each of them defining their shape by the edges of the other.

She wonders if the sky can define its shape by the sea and the stone.  Wonders if the sky has a shape at all.  Wonders just what they see, when they look at her.  She feels like air, today, transparent and unreal, assumed but invisible.  Nathan leans in, clicks the mouth of his bottle of beer against Duke’s, follows the movement down for two more points of contact, a rolling salute that speaks to familiarity and habit, and Duke’s smile reaches his eyes, and neither of them notice her watching.

She wonders what it would take to make herself real.  Wonders what sort of storm she’d have to bring, to make a dent in either of them.

She knows she’s not being fair.

Knows she’s already tangled herself through both of them, left them bound and windblown in her wake.  Knows that she’s scarred them, dragged them into her orbit- that they couldn’t go back to who they were before they knew her even if they wanted to.

She knows that neither of them wants to.

She wonders what sort of storm they could raise, the three of them, if they put their minds to it.  Sea and stone and sky, lashing rain and trembling earth and screaming wild wind.

She thinks that it might be worth it, to know she’d left a mark.  To know she’d done _something_ real, to know she wasn’t just a mirage.

She thinks that together, the three of them might just be able to stop the world from spinning.

She wonders if she’s brave enough to try.


End file.
